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The stochastically best book to read on each country
A while back I requested random recommendations from readers about the best books to read about particular countries. I call them “stochastically best” because I have some faith in your judgments, yet without really trusting you one whit. Here is one of the two very last installments in that series, taken and collated from comments you all have submitted:
…or Australia it’s still Year of the Angry Rabbit:Bill Bryson’s Down Under for a casual read on an outsider’s perspective or Phillip Knightley’s Australia: A Biography of a Nation, Russell Ward, The Australian Legend
Turkey? I liked Crescent and Star by Stephen Kinzer.
I liked Hugh Pope’s Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkish World
Norman Stone wrote a very readable short history of Turkey.
For the Philippines, either “In Our Image” by Karnow or “Touch Me Not” by Rizal
I thought this book on Cambodia was fantastic: Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. The author won a Pullitzer Prize for his reporting on the Khmer Rouge.
On Myanmar: “Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma” by Richard Cockett
Indonesia…etc. for… Indonesia (Elisabeth Pisani)
I second this opinion. Pisani was illuminating for me.
For Thailand: “Thailand’s Political History: From the Fall of Ayutthaya to Recent Times” by B. J. Terwiel is a fresh look. Many of the other books I have read follow the same boiler-plate narrative that’s been published for decades. His work also brings to light some unique source material that is valuable to the discussion.
Michael King’s “A Penguin History of New Zealand”
The Search for Modern China, China – Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos
RE: #17 China Chinese History: A New Manual; Fourth (2017 “bluebook”) or Fifth Editions (2015 “greenbook”) by Endymion Wilkinson
Yeah, and for a more contemporary take, the late great Richard Baum’s Great Courses lecture series (2010), Fall and Rise of China, completes the picture (Still noting that Tyler speaking of books, Baum’s lectures are so elegant, that the transcripts serve as a wonderful book.). All and all, Endymion’s work is the best out there in the Chinese scholarship community.
If you collected all of Simon Leys essays on China that would be a very insightful book on the country – mostly touching on culture and politics. Beautifully and memorably written too. Simon Leys seems to me one of the most under-rated essayists of recent decades.
Pakistan, Breaking the Curfew by Emma Duncan
The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq by Hanna Batatu.
India: the Idea of India, Subaltans & Raj: South Asia since 1600, Richard Lannoy : The Speaking Tree
Does anyone have any opinion of India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha?
For India, one of my favourite books is “India: A History” by John Keay. It focuses much more on historical facts and events without passing judgement. I believe it is an extremely good and unbiased summary of Indian history from the Indus Valley Civilization to modern India.
While I haven’t found any properly good book that covers South India history, “A History of South India” by K.A. Nilakanta Sastri and “A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations” by Noboru Karashima do address this topic.
I am on a Tamim Ansary kick, so I’ll propose “Games Without Rules” for Afghanistan.
Daniel Tudor’s “Korea: The Impossible Country” is a good read, which has chapters dedicated to antiquity and its influence on modern (South) Korea but mostly does concentrate on how the country is now and recent history. Tudor recommends “The Koreans,” since updated as “The New Koreans,” by Michael Breen, and “The Two Koreas” by Robert Carlin as “two foundational texts.” Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy” is a fascinating book about what life in North Korea is like for ordinary North Koreans.
Burma / Myannmar: The River of Lost Footsteps
Haiti: Dubois’ Aftershocks of History? (though you’d know better)
Here are previous installments in the series.
Monday assorted links
Will Trumpian foreign policy prove permanent?
I see several elements of Trumpian foreign policy, noting this list is far from exhaustive:
1. Little if any emphasis on human rights.
2. There is no particular tendency to prefer to deal with the democracies, if anything the contrary (it is easier to do “funny” opportunistic deals with the autocrats, plus democratic citizens, especially in Western Europe, may not want their leaders to do deals with Trump).
3. Problems can pop up all over the place, there is nothing special about Europe, and Europe is irrelevant to many of the most important geopolitical struggles.
4. Allies, if that word even can be used, pop up on an opportunistic basis and then are rapidly discarded if need be, with no expectations of feelings really being hurt either. Period-by-period maximization is more common than credibility or investing in relationships.
5. The doctrine of “maximum pressure.” Trump has been trying this with North Korea, and to a lesser extent with China, although with inconsistencies in both cases. This consists of dropping a lot of the diplomatic pretense and simply declaring that the U.S. will do everything possible to bring about some outcome, and then making some moves in that direction.
6. Not worrying as much about the kind of diplomatic processes traditionally imposed by the State Department. #2, #4, and #5 above often are more consistent with a kind of direct transactionalism than with the bureaucratization of foreign policy.
I now believe that, for better or worse, #1-6 are likely to survive in American foreign policy, with or without the reelection of Donald Trump.
Sunday assorted links
1. Very good Matina Stevis-Gridneff piece on the militarization of the Horn of Africa (WSJ). Excellent visuals, too.
2. Will they find Frida Kahlo’s famous missing painting?
3. The polity that is California.
4. “These days, I find myself thinking more and more about issues of morality and character. In particular, I think that trying to emphasize social opinions rather than personal character does not work well.” That is Arnold Kling.
*Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection, 1815-1849*
The bottom line here is that I ordered all of Philip Dwyer’s other books on Napoleon. This one covers Napoleon’s time on St. Helena and how the memory of Napoleon was processed after his death, running up through the return of Napoleon’s body to France. Here is one excerpt:
In 1840, the year of the return of Napoleon’s remains to France, thirteen or fourteen “Napoleons” were admitted to the insane asylum at Bicêtre in the south of Paris. One can imagine that each of them considered the others to be made. Of course, there had been people suffering from this kind of delusion even while he was still alive. In 1818, at least five people were admitted to Charenton hospital believing they were Napoleon. Now, however, Napoleon was being caricatured, right down to his temperament — ‘imperial’, proud, haughty, abrupt, tyrannical, capricious, choleric. The men (and one woman that we know of) who believed they were Napoleon always fit the same profile: they took themselves seriously, they gave orders and they demanded loyalty; in return they treated people with disdain.
Definitely recommended, surprisingly gripping throughout, you can buy it here.
Saturday assorted links
1. Guns, suicides, and homicides.
2. “The Brazil of mid-2018 is a frightened, leaderless, shockingly pessimistic country.”
3. Econink.com.
4. They solved for the equilibrium, link now corrected. And what an equilibrium it was. Yikes.
5. “Who’s going to pay for Kim Jong Un’s [Singapore] hotel stay?“
The ongoing experiment with bootstrap equilibria, also known as tokens
There are many economics papers on bootstrap equilibria, for instance if agents in an economy expect it will do well, maybe that translates into actual results through the mechanisms of confidence, investment, and so on.
Right now we have a huge and unprecedented laboratory for testing claims about bootstrap equilibria, namely crypto and in particular the markets for tokens. Imagine you are a private entrepreneur, and you have a new idea for how a money or store of value should be run. Yet, to give your asset some value, you need to convince others your idea is valid.
One option is to write better software than that governing existing crypto-assets.
Another option, increasingly popular, is to use your market power in some good or service to make your “gift certificate” (read: token) more focal. Let’s say for instance that you have invented a new computer game that in some regards is better than that of the competitors. The “old school” approach was to sell the game for a profit, and of course that still often goes on.
Yet there is now another option. Try to cash those potential profits into yet higher profits by using them to build focality for a new money. Issue tokens that can be used to play the game. You hope that will create a demand for the new money you are issuing and thus bootstrap its value. If requiring money to be used to buy a “get out of jail card for having paid your taxes” works for Uncle Sam, might not “get to play this computer game token/card” give your money positive value too?
Let’s say the market can support 4000 different monies, one public the others private. In equilibrium, which are the services that get tokenized? Is it?:
1. The services with high mark-ups? Low mark-ups?
2. Big consumer bases?
3. Well informed and well coordinated consumer bases?
4. “Influencer” consumer bases, in the Gladwellian sense?
5. “Trivial” consumer bases, that you don’t mind risking?
6. Some other properties? What I observe so far is that crypto-assets are being created by nerdy tech types, and thus they are linked to goods and services that also are created by those same nerdy tech types — a classic economies of scope, lack of trust on the supply side question. I doubt if many of the top executives at Nordstrom are sitting around wondering whether their next Fall sale should be attached to a crypto-token. But exactly why not? This probably boils down to trust issues, rather than any intrinsic suitability of the product.
Is there any good theory paper on these questions?
Note that Heinrich Rittershausen, writing in the early twentieth century, thought that eventually most goods and services would be self-financing through their own currencies.
What theory of bootstraps can we divine from the data on which tokens meet the market test? (Or is it too early to say?…but surely we can start in on a measurement…) Am I correct in thinking that the really successful consumer products just want to take the profits and run, without bothering with tokenization? There is no such thing as an Apple token, is there?
Help! And no, I am not giving away free tokens…for any good or service.
Friday assorted links
1. Skepticism about AI and deep learning.
2.The Ethiopian Urban Expansion Initiative.
3. “Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors’ offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients.” Link here.
4. There is a Klay Thompson Magnus Carlsen article of substance (WSJ).
The internet and inflation
From Austan D. Goolsbee and Peter J. Klenow:
We use Adobe Analytics data on online transactions for millions of products in many different categories from 2014 to 2017 to shed light on how online inflation compares to overall inflation, and to gauge the magnitude of new product bias online. The Adobe data contain transaction prices and quantities purchased. We estimate that online inflation was about 1 percentage point lower than in the CPI for the same categories from 2014–2017. In addition, the rising variety of products sold online, implies roughly 2 percentage points lower inflation than in a matched model/CPI-style index.
I call this “the gains from better matching,” as discussed in The Complacent Class.
Thursday assorted links
1. How good or bad is it being a truck driver? (WaPo)
2. “‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.” And: “Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?” Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.”
4. The philosophy of computational complexity, yet another advance.
5. Unveiling secret Twitter accounts in which GMs perhaps criticize their players?
6. Why don’t insurers care more about large health insurance bills? An understudied puzzle.
A microeconomic guide to travel, including Ethiopia
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opener:
I sometimes wish the market supplied “travel guides as if microeconomics really mattered.” Most guides outline the major sights and the best hotels, but what about the little things that make up so much of the value of a trip? Here’s my handy introduction to the micro side of travel, based on my recent 10-day stay in Ethiopia. You should consider investigating these same factors before choosing a destination:
How are the sidewalks?
I enjoy walking around cities, but it’s not just the quality of the architecture or the vitality of the street life that matter. The quality of the sidewalks is a central consideration, especially in emerging economies. What good are the sights if you are looking down all the time to avoid a slip or a broken ankle because of gaping holes? Sometimes major thoroughfares have no sidewalks at all.
I am happy to report that in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, the quality of the sidewalks and street paths is high enough to sustain productive walking with your head held high. Most of the time. B, and B+ outside the capital.
There is much more at the link, definitely recommended.
Is surfing the internet dead?
I saw a few people asking this on Twitter lately, but my views don’t quite fit into a tweet. Ten to fifteen years ago, I remember the joys of just finding things, clicking links through to other links, and in general meandering through a thick, messy, exhilarating garden.
Today you can’t do that as much. Many media sites are gated, a lot of the personal content is in the walled garden of Facebook, and blogs and personal home pages are not as significant as before. Then there is the email subscription newsletter, whether free or paid. All you can do in fact is visit www.marginalrevolution.com and a few other sites and hope their proprietors have not been sleeping since you last stopped by.
That said, I do not feel that time on the internet has become an inferior experience. It’s just that these days you find most things by Twitter. You don’t have to surf, because this aggregator performs a surfing-like function for you. Scroll rather than surf, you could say (“scrolling alone,” said somebody on Twitter).
And if you hate Twitter, it is your fault for following the wrong people (try hating yourself instead!). Follow experts and people of substance, not people who seek to lower the status of others. And if you’re really feeling the internet to be rather empty, head on over to Twitter search, still the most underrated single thing on the internet today (the MR search function is another underrated corner of the internet). Type in words of interest, such as “Ethiopia,” and what comes up will be gold.
It’s a different method today, and it uses a more centralized portal, but no the internet is not in decline. Not yet at least.
Ben Thompson on data portability and Facebook
The problem with data portability is that it goes both ways: if you can take your data out of Facebook to other applications, you can do the same thing in the other direction. The question, then, is which entity is likely to have the greater center of gravity with regards to data: Facebook, with its social network, or practically anything else?
Remember the conditions that led to Facebook’s rise in the first place: the company was able to circumvent Google, go directly to users, and build a walled garden of data that the search company couldn’t touch. Partnering or interoperating with companies below the Bill Gates Line, particularly aggregators, is simply an invitation to be intermediated. To demand that governments enforce exactly that would be a massive mistake that only helps Facebook.
Link to the post, with further explanation, is here. You can and should subscribe to Ben here. Here is my earlier post on data portability.
Wednesday assorted links
1. How futures trading affected Bitcoin prices.
3. Ethiopia on me on Ethiopia: “In the US very well educated and very sophisticated cosmopolitan people have no sense of how nice things are in Ethiopia and how well things are going. These include people with PhDs in economics familiar with Davos for a regular economic meeting.”
5. The invisible asymptote: “More people are more skilled at being hurtful in text than photos.” A good post with many points of interest.
Michael Nielsen, standing on one foot
A highly sophisticated MR reader demanded a dose of Michael Nielsen. I wrote to Michael, and he was kind enough to oblige. Everything that follows is from Michael, here goes:
I started with the question “What might amuse Tyler?”, and it became very easy.
Three opinions that may amuse MR readers:
1. Peter Thiel has said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 (280) characters.” Thiel is wrong: 280 characters are much, much better than flying cars. Twitter is misunderstood as being an online service; it’s merely the online component of a much improved offline experience. Twitter DM’s are a superpower, one of the most valuable ways of connecting people ever invented. More on one way of using Twitter here.
2. Movies are primarily a visual form; movie criticism and the popular conversation about movies are primarily a literary form, and informed by literary sensibilities. This is why good movies such as Transformers are so underrated. People who dismiss such movies are mostly revealing their own ignorance.
3. Many corners of the internet have a culture of judgement or argument. Typical subtexts in online conversation are: is this good or bad? What’s wrong with it? But until and unless healthy conversational norms are formed, argument and judgement are mostly useless status-seeking by participants. Much better is a “Yes, and” culture.
Three books or papers which should be better known:
1. Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons. Ostrom dismantles the market / government dichotomy, sketching out ways common pool resources (and, to some extent, public goods) can be provided using non-market, non-government solutions.
2. Alex Tabarrok’s paper introducing dominant assurance contracts. Cryptocurrencies have huge potential as a way of creating entirely new types of market, using ideas like this. This potential is mostly unrealized to date.
3. Bret Victor on Media for Thinking the Unthinkable.
Blog posts don’t really get going until about 5,000 words in. Here are three favourites of mine:
1. Thought as a Technology, on how imaginative designers invent fundamentally new modes of thought.
2. If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?
3. Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence (with Shan Carter).
Despite the fact I’m well short of 5,000 words, I’ll stop here.
You can follow Michael on Twitter here.